meeting an original Newsie in real life (plus some “Blood Drips on Newsies Square” lore!)
bruh this is kinda silly because he was the one who got me into Newsies in the first place 🤣🙈 So I was in a month-long independent filmmaking workshop led by Michael Goorjian (who plays Skittery in the 1992 movie) at my old university, the American University of Armenia, which ended this week. I got obsessed with Newsies over the course of last month, imma tell the story in this long post…
Some background: After being in Newsies, Michael went on to win an Emmy award for Best Actor (🤯) in 1994 for the tv film “David’s Mother”, and starred in a lot of other films and TV shows like CSI, House, Lie to Me, and Monk (my family’s fave!!). He also directed several indie films and continued working in theatre.
He’s half Armenian so I think the workshop was sort of a homecoming for him 🥹 (I mean, he said it’s not the first time he’s been here, but yea I also think of how I’ve been in Yerevan for 8 years and I’m more familiar with it than him, which is fascinating.. My dad said, “It probably changed him more than it changed you guys.” 😭🥹💓)
On Day 1 of the workshop last month, he told us how he got into indie filmmaking in the first place, first by showing clips from indie films he liked and showed us some concepts with them (the crying moment from Lars von Trier’s “Breaking the Waves” and the silhouetted actors’ performances discussing the book of Revelation in Mike Lee’s sci-fi-y “Naked” were my faves). Then he showed us clips of the indie films he made.
He started off by explaining how he was in this musical called Newsies - us in Armenia had never seen it unfortunately 😭😭 (although I’d heard of it before & probs seen the costumes while growing up as a theatre kid in the Philippines and Nepal); he talked about how they were in the backlot of Universal for 6 months. He said he shot a horror film there called “Blood Drips in Newsies Square,” (YEPPP) and he showed some clips of it (including the crew intro, then the murderer character throwing someone off the roof - I was like, “wow, their costumes… the kid’s accent is so authentic…” bruh little did I know that was Racetrack’s actual accent LOOOL).
He explained how he shot it with a VHS camera - it took 11 seconds for it to start up and whenever you paused the camera, it’d take 7 seconds for it to actually record video after you pressed play…
Someone asked about whether he was inspired by Hitchcock’s soundtracks and he said that he actually had a CD of that at the time, and he got someone to hold up a boombox beside the camera and he played it on the side 😂😂 (I think he used the same method last week when my group asked him to make a cooking tutorial video for our short film 🤭🤣 He seemed to have a second phone blasting Henry Mancini on the side of the one he used to record video, for background music… LOL I forgot to ask him if my guess was right 😭).
While watching the clip of Racetrack being thrown off the roof, I wonder how he got the audio of him screaming, since it seemed to be shot in real time. When he was talking about the audio during our little q&a he said he also got Max Casella to scream beside the camera for that 🤣🤣 real ingenious… yeah, that was a big inspiration for us when we had to shoot our films on Week 4 haha.
Anyway, for the second week, he gave us a film to watch for homework (Decalogue: One), but over the weekend I was itching to watch Newsies as a theatre kid and bc Christian Bale was in it 🤣 also I was curious to see how our prof looked like in it xD (although I’d googled him there and found that someone actually made a fanfic with him in it? BRUH WHAT THE-) I didn’t have enough time on the weekend to watch it though…
But we had a cancelled class that next week so I used that time to watch Newsies with my little brother. (Which was perfect after watching Decalogue, since its ending was depressing 😭💓) The next day, we had class as usual and, when it ended, I got to tell him that I saw Newsies. I mentioned my brother especially liked it because it had the “A barbershop haircut that costs a quarter” tune and I fricking SANG that line in front of him to try and illustrate what I meant - what even - but sadly he didn’t recognize it T_T
I asked him what the most challenging thing was to shoot it, and he replied, “Well… it was a long time ago.. we rehearsed for three months..” And I made some comment from a theatre kids’ perspective, but I didn’t know how to take the convo from there, so thankfully my friend interrupted us (she was the university’s Film Society head and was asking him to do a q&a about his film, SLC Punk). And I realized while going home that, bruh, it was more than 30 years ago when he did that movie, so it makes sense that he didn’t remember the Barbershop theme 😭
I also didn’t realize that it actually came from there - my brother was into the meme a few weeks prior but when we heard King of New York in the movie I just thought it was just a “jazz standard” tune of the theatre world. But I found out when I got home — imagine my reaction knowing that my prof is connected to a brainrot meme 🤯😭
But yeah, side note - becoming a fan of the Newsies world at that point in time was kinda poignant, because it was just a week since the Trillion Peso March back in my home country of the Philippines. Tens of thousands marched against corruption in the government (backstory: we have, on average, 15 typhoons per year and people die during the floods, so the government allotted funds to ‘flood control projects’ - but greedy officials stole trillions of pesos from those). So the songs of Newsies - the ‘little people’ railing on against the corrupt forces embodied in Pulitzer and Hearst - resonated with me as a Filipino who was angry at the injustice in my home country.
On a lighter note, I got my brother and Filipino neighbor (who’d seen half of the Broadway Newsies) into the songs as well, we even did a karaoke session of them 🤣
Back to the workshop - so on Week 2 and 3, we were divided into four groups (there were about 21 students) and we started working on the script. Michael’s point since the beginning was just for us to go and make something, and he and his teaching assistant (an Armenian film researcher, Artsvi Bakhchinyan) guided us through the process. My group and I were all university students (I was the only master’s student tho) - vs. how other groups had a few film professionals with them - so we were going through a lot of indecisive arguments about how the story should go, but Michael gave advice that made it simpler & doable.
End of Week 3 had us prepping for the shoot - I was originally the director but I was the only available camera person so I turned over directing to two other members; plus our Producer got sick so I got that role too. Everyone basically had a hand at everything - that’s really how indie filmmaking goes. And I got to see Michael at work even if he was only assisting us - giving us advice on lots of topics: how to negotiate with the manager of the location we wanted (“Ya gotta be charming” 😆), how to record sound, how to make a shot list - hang on, side story here..
So I was debating whether or not to ask him for an autograph eventually, but it felt kinda lame XD Turns out, I didn’t have to, because, when I was asking him for advice on our shot list (I was using Vimeo’s complicated template so he was like, “what the heck am I looking at here” 🤦🏻♀️), he asked if he could write a shot list template on my notebook to show us:
Dude is left-handed XD he writes like my lefty sister 🤣💗 yaaas super awesome.
Anyway, I got even more impressed at him being a real indie filmmaker when we had a briefing session on our last day of class. We were discussing how we were gonna edit our films in the university’s media lab over the weekend - he wanted to oversee us and help out, and he said, “I can do sound design for you.” And I was like, Bro knows everythinggg 😭🙌🏽 BAHAHA.
So on the actual editing weekend (it took my group 3 days, we were all staying up till midnight there) he helped us fix big problems with some of our footage. I was assigned to do the music - I had musical ideas for the film but I’d never worked with sound libraries before so I was just endlessly searching for the right thing (man if I could compose, I would’ve done it on the spot T_T) He came up and I shared what I wanted and some references, and he was like “search the Birdman soundtrack” (yeah we could use any music since it was just an educational project). That helped me find the rest of the stuff I needed.
I even saw him export everyone’s films on the day of the films’ premiere/workshop graduation ceremony (this was last Tuesday, Oct 21) since my friend and I asked him for a last-minute consultation session for screenplays we were writing. People kept interrupting us to share updates about the export process going on in the editing room and someone handed him an SD card at one point, so he had to excuse himself from our session several times, and it was really cool just watching that.
For a few weeks beforehand, my class already had this secret project going on to make a thank-you poster collage for him, so I ran to do that right after the consultation session. I organized the thing (asking ppl to send me their group pics) and brought the materials and asked people to glue the collage together. It reminded me of how the Newsies cast came together to prank Kenny Ortega, or even Michael himself organizing people to make “Blood Drips” 🤣 We also had a plan to buy him Armenian donuts called “ponchik” (since it was a reference to his film, Amerikatsi), but since he had to leave right after the event, we didn’t manage to do it :( But yeah, it was worth it - the whole class coming together for this:
(pity it's low quality T_T it's from the Asbarez news article)
Overall, I was amazed at how we were graced by the same creative spirit of that kid who got so antsy on the Newsies set that he made his own movie there, all those years ago.
And I was glad I got to bring my brother to our premiere event and take a picture with him, so like, “yea i took him to see a real live Newsie." LOL <3
